Big box retail centers typically range in size from 90,000 to 200,000 square feet and use a windowless box store design with a single-floor layout. Well known examples of big box retailers include Home Depot, Lowe's, Toys “R” Us, Circuit City, Crown Books, Office Depot, Sports Authority and Builders Square. These and other big box retailers are known as “category killers” because they are large niche retailers that buy and sell huge volumes of merchandise at low prices in a particular product category. The category killer retail model depends on high-volume sales rather than price markups.
In an attempt to avoid price markups, category killer big box retailers will usually eliminate middlemen and deal directly with product vendors. These big box retailers typically agree to allow vendor services representatives to pay regular visits to the retail stores. The service representatives work with store management to negotiate such things as the location, presentation and price of the vendor's products. Service representatives also sell product lines, place orders for additional products, manage defective or broken products, ensure that the proper advertising and signage is in place, etc. In general, service representative do whatever it takes to ensure that the vendor's products are selling at desired performance levels.
Many service representatives are employed by a service representative agency. The agency may have contracts to represent vendors in particular regions. The agency may divide its regions into territories that are assigned to the service representatives. A service representative will often represent multiple vendors within a given territory. Often times, a service representative will service multiple vendors in a single big box retail center.
Data collected by service representatives is currently complied on paper forms (e.g., “Call Sheets”). These paper forms are typically mailed or faxed to the vendor, who analyzes the data and generates reports. The paper-based system involves many inefficiencies, most notably the delay involved in transmitting the paper forms to the vendor and the processing time for extracting and compiling data from the paper forms to be input into a report. In addition, the paper-based system does not provide a convenient mechanism for verifying the dates, times and durations of service calls. Thus, service representative accountability is often in question.
Accordingly, there remains a need for a system and method of providing service representation that would enable organizations to reduce cost of operations, increase productivity of their mobile field forces and drive improved efficiencies throughout.